She opened another box. It was a tie featuring a scattering of mountain bikes.
“You loved that Ritchey P-29,” she said.
Mac said nothing for a time. “I told you before, Ty has a very fixed idea of what I should be.”
“While you have no fixed ideas about anything.”
“Ha,” he said. Not sounding amused.
She gingerly, carefully settled the ties back into place, abstractedly fussing with their alignment as if she were an engineer and something critical would topple if they were a hair out of place.
And then she turned to him.
“And yet you keep them. The ties.”
This yielded stony silence.
“Where is Ty now?”
“New York.”
The short answer made his displeasure at the direction of the conversation known.
“Why the inquisition, Avalon?” he asked, a moment later.
“It’s not an inquisition.”
This wasn’t entirely true.
He closed up. She didn’t know whether he was even aware of doing it. It was subtle. He slid his hand out from beneath her head and folded it under his own. He shifted a little so that his hip wasn’t touching hers. He now occupied a space on the bed described by himself alone.
“It was probably pretty hard for him, too. The whole thing with your dad. And at least he’s trying. It’s a gesture. A symbol.”
“And we know how you feel about grand gestures, huh, Avalon?”
Damn. Ironic, that sentence. Ironic, heading toward bitter.
“Sometimes it’s less about what you want and more about what another person might need, Mac.”
That was ironic heading toward bitter, too. She did not like the sound of it in her voice.
Suddenly this wasn’t just about his brother or the ties.
“It’s just... maybe he doesn’t knowhowelse to connect with you. How are you ever going to know if you don’t talk to him?”
He drew in a long breath and sighed it out. “Avalon... I don’t think you understand what it was like after all of that went down. Everywhere I turned there was swirling chaos, like a tornado. And... let’s say you captured that tornado that would otherwise destroy you and keep on destroying everything else in its path and stuffed it into a garbage can and clapped on the lid. You have one option after that. You keep the lid on all the way and never open it. Because if you ever open it even a little bit it’ll escape and it’s destruction all over again.”
“But was it really that easy to just cut everyone out?”
“Isanythingeasy? I learned a long time ago certain kinds of ties can turn into a noose.”
Her stomach went peculiarly cold. “Boy. Talk about a pickup line.”
He didn’t laugh.
Which was fine, because she didn’t think it was funny, either.
And now she was closing up, too, and she only half realized it. She shifted her arms against her body protectively.
